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Raspberry Pi - Available - Kind of....

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You may have read my earlier post on the Raspberry Pi. It is a linux computer on a chip/board about the size of a credit card. The first run went on sale earlier this week. I had hoped to get one of those. Alas, I think they made them available on the old continent before they allowed us yanks to get one. I had my name on Newark's waiting list. I got an email from them this afternoon. I could now order one!

Alas, the expected ship date is April 1, 2012.... I sure hope it isn't an April fools joke since I charge $35 to my credit card.

They are ramping up production so anyone should be able to get on or more in a month or so.

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I can remember when HP was the premier technology company in the world. They sold the most cutting edge equipment and backed it up with absolute support. Unfortunately, they are just like any other tech company today.

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I have been following R-Pi for almost a year. It really is a credit card sized computer that will run Linux. So far, there are versions of Ubuntu, Arch, and Fedora ported. Since Ubuntu is working it shouldn't be long if not already that Debian will be available.

There are two commercial parts suppliers that have been licensed to sell the R-Pi, RS Systems and Farnell/Newark. That should make them easily available around the world. Once production ramps up they should be available off the shelf. I pre-ordered from Newark, my latest ship date is May 15.

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Actually the reason behind the project was to ease the teaching of programming, so no suprise that the OSes that have been tailored to fit well on the raspberry pi provide a comfy environment to learn how to code.

The combination of price, power consumption and the fact that the system is based on an ARM architecture has excited the *nix geeks, who are ready to use the raspberry pi in the most creative ways possible.

I don't think that OpenOffice or KOffice are available for ARM, so a good point to understand is whether there's a mature and robust word processor to be used on that system (i think that google docs or Office Live won't work because of the lack of RAM).

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I love my Pi, but it is just an educational tool more than anything else. For more powerful ARM units, you'll end up paying a little more (upwards of $100 or so), but they are much more capable with better support through Android, and probably other ARM based OSes, but the hardware support is not very wide. For anyone looking for a really beefy ARM unit, I'd look at the ODROID-U2. I'll probably get one in the summer to use as a full media center, rather than having to turn on the PS3 for youtube videos.

Hey, I'm not dead, I've moved over to using the nickname "Mr. Xtreme", and mostly use Linux distros/Windows 10, though it seems I'm gonna have to hackintosh again, so, hey everyone who remembers me! :wave: